I think the main point is not who suffers, but who cares and why. We have a lot of people suffering around due to lots of reasons, but don't actually care to fix that. E.g. "abortion" after birth is biologically rejected by many, because it completely contradicts the evolutional efforts of a group to survive and reproduce. That's why children make many of us happy — if you're not happy or careful enough, then they're quickly dead, and your group is dead. Other animals have different strategies, from having hundreds of children to being pregnant for years, so child is ready to fall to the ground and go travel in five minutes.

Suffering has nothing to do with it, it's just a biological motivator for both parent and child to escape pre-reproduction death with insignificant side-effects like really, really missing a nice car or just an ice cream.

But while this topic is naturally highly dependent on "local" social rules, I think modern society should put responsibility and planning on the first place. If someone is not very sure that s/he can raise, care of, or simply enjoy the parenthood, it must be okay to abort it, unless that overweights all imaginable social programs. Like killing born children, for one. With modern society atomization and precision, abortion absolutely falls into "not your business" category in most places, unless one has very conservative and/or intrusive religious views, which is a bad thing itself, given how many completely different minds have to interact now on daily basis.

Your first paragraph explains what evolutionary forces have shaped our minds and societies. It's unclear why that should be a basis for ethics. If that was our goal we should all have ten children and user religious devotion to stay cohesive as a group.

If avoiding suffering is the issue ten anyone can be murdered morally under the right conditions. I can stab you in your sleep (painlessly), and that would be fine according to this criterion.

It would certainly not OK unless you also painlessly kill my wife, family and friends. Of course I would still be afraid of it because we have the irrational existence bias built in. I'm not particularly upset about the fact that I didn't exist 100 years ago so why should I be upset about not existing 100 years from now as long as no suffering is involved. Of course knowing that our existence is about to end causes as agony due to our biases. That doesn't mean though that we as a rational society should allow these biased to set or goals. We need to take them into account though.

Morally, that is only true for the first iterative pass. We are social creatures.

If you like Peter Singer's approach so much, then you agree with him that one should be allowed to "abort" babies for a long time after birth as well? No? I guess it's not so easy after all.

You're being hyperbolic but we don't allow children to make medical decisions for themselves until the age of majority, and parents can choose to make medical decisions that they know will result in the death of a child (eg refusing treatment for life-threatening diseases due to religious concerns).

So effectively yes, this is already the state of things, and there is no serious movement to restrict this form of post-birth abortion. Who would have imagined that all it would take for abortion to gain acceptance is to frame it as a religious liberty?

(correct answer: anyone who's lived in America)

>parents can choose to make medical decisions that they know will result in the death of a child (eg refusing treatment for life-threatening diseases due to religious concerns).

That is false. Parents cannot legally deny their children life-saving treatment.

Also, I'm not sure where I am being hyperbolic. Peter Singer literally does advocate for the "right" to kill young children for a long time after their birth. So if you say that Peter Singer offers an "easy" moral approach to abortion, I have to ask whether you actually do agree with his logic and follow it to the same ultimate conclusions that he does.

Actually I do agree with that as well. Where I'm much more of a bigot is when it comes to the much more obvious issue of how we treat animals. I was a vegetarian for several years but have up on it because I didn't believe it was making a difference. If we had a vote though to ban animal slaughter and especially factory farming I'd vote for it in a heartbeat.

It depends on the circumstances. We don't kill animals because we are hungry. We kill animals because we want more enjoyment from food. If you are somewhere starving and it's you it the rabbit, go for it. That's not the common situation though.

Euthanasia is a much more complicated topic and I find it bewildering that we are focusing on this discussion on babies. I assume it's out of some notion of protecting the adorable innocence. I think it's important with these topics to try to keep emotions out of it because they just reflect biases we have built in due to evolution. Evolution of course is not your friend. Especially not after you've procreated.

I wouldn't argue that we should legalize killing infants and toddlers, but I would suggest that the tendency for the whole society to lose its collective shit about infanticide is related to our discomfort with the legal status of abortion. Ethically, there doesn't seem to be much difference between an infant one day before and one day after birth. Of course, ours is not an ethical society, so killing one is perfectly legal while killing the other will inspire a vituperative media circus, widespread hand-wringing, and decades in prison. Why is that? It seems that mothers who kill their young children function as scapegoats, so that we may have a focus for the hazy sense of guilt that many of us feel about abortion.

So a fetus can't suffer? I think science has proven quite the opposite.

I think the point is that a fetus doesn't have the capacity to suffer before a certain point. A blastula of cells shortly after conception is not capable of feeling pain, but a fetus at 8 months likely is. OP is saying that it would be morally acceptable to terminate pregnancy before the point where we could establish that the fetus was capable of suffering.

Being unfamiliar with Peter Singers ethical approach, it was not clear to me from the parent comment alone that the notion of suffering extended also to a developed fetus.

While an interesting approach, I'm not sure I agree that the ability to suffer is enough of a definition of humanity to use in isolation. It also does not account for scenarios where one might be willing to suffer on behalf of another. In other words, I'm not sure there exists an absolute scale of suffering which we can use to judge the morality of such a scenario. Again, maybe I'm not familiar enough with this ethical framework.

Singer is definitively pro-abortion, for basically the reasons I mentioned. It's not terribly nuanced, it follows pretty directly from his basic ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#Abortion.2C_eutha...

I'm not super expert about it either (at best a casual armchair philosopher), but from what I know Singers philosophy isn't specifically about suffering, it's about weighing interests. He assumes that the desire to avoid pain is one of the more important interests, hence it takes priority most (but not all) of the time. It's not black and white, it's more of a calculus about weighing the different competing interests of individuals, with certain classes of interests being given more weight than others.

I think Singers arguments in favor of abortion actually go farther than what OP's post implied regarding the fetus' capacity to feel pain. Singer argues that a fetus is unable to have any self-interests (including the desire to avoid pain), hence the interests of the mother should be given priority. I think this is taking it too far myself; I can agree with the delineation of the fetus' capacity to feel pain, but it is not clear to me at what point (if any) Singer feels it would be immoral to abort a fetus.

Just to clarify, Singer believes that you should be allowed to kill babies for years after birth.

I discovered last year that people are actually promoting this. I've been attacked by people because I do not agree with late-term (for no medical reason) and after-birth abortion:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_natur...

It is almost in the same line of thinking that infants are not capable of feeling pain and why some operations on them were done without anesthesia:

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/opinion/l-why-infant-surge...

I believe some operations on infants are still being done without it:

http://gizmodo.com/why-are-so-many-newborns-still-being-deni...

"to this day, many procedures are performed on newborns without the benefit of analgesics. That’s largely because of an enduring misconception in the medical community that newborns don’t feel pain like adults."

Yep, there's also Antinatalism, which is the belief that having children is immoral. There are a few different strains, but greatly oversimplifying my favorite is that suffering in life outweighs pleasure, so bringing a new life into existence increases the net amount of suffering and is thus immoral.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism

> It is almost in the same line of thinking that infants are not capable of feeling pain and why some operations on them were done without anesthesia

While that sentiment is certainly a part of medical history, there's a good reason why many procedures on infants are still carried out without anesthesia today. Infants are fragile and most forms of pain relief we use on adults are simply too dangerous for infants. Any anesthesiologist will weigh the benefits vs. the risks for each particular procedure and for infants that ratio is considerably different compared to adults.

Is it really that dangerous?

"Key medical objections to infant anesthesia - that it was (a) unnecessary and (b) dangerous - were resolved by the brilliant research of Kanwal Anand and colleagues at Oxford from 1985 to 1987. Making precise measurements of infant reactions to surgery, they proved that the babies experienced pain, needed and tolerated anesthesia well, and had probably been dying of metabolic and endocrine shock following unanesthetized operations."

Source: http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/second/chamberlain.html

I'm not a medical doctor and not necessarily current on the latest research. However, there is quite a lot of evidence that general anesthesia is fairly likely to cause actual brain damage in infants and young children [1,2] with significant consequences in later life and there are (less significant, but still non-trivial) issues with various methods of local anesthesia. As far as I know, there's a lot of unsolved issues in the field of infant anesthesiology and the general trend is to err on the side of caution.

[1] http://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/news/20120820/anesthesia...

[2] https://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm364078.h...

If there is a need for "repeated or lengthy use of general anesthetic" on infants there is usually already something wrong which could attribute to the said symptoms as well. It would be crazy to not use anesthesia on young children based on this warning, as shock (Which usually happens when operated on without anesthetics and the reason the child is silent during and a while after the operation) may cause worse damage.

The first reference I linked specifically controlled not just for disorders that could lead to similar symptoms, but even things like the mother's socioeconomic status, etc. The effect was still huge.

I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting simply forgoing anesthesia in life threatening cases, but people might want to rethink a routine tonsillectomy or some dental work.

More shocking than that you would even be allowed to die when you are ill and suffering too much. You know like we do with our pets because we love them and don't want them to suffer.

Yeah that's exactly what I was getting at. I couldn't remember if he had taken it that far but I thought I recalled reading that.

"While an interesting approach, I'm not sure I agree that the ability to suffer is enough of a definition of humanity to use in isolation"

The statement was not about defining humanity. Why is it relevant if something is human or not? Would it be OK to torture non-human life that's clearly in possession of cautiousness just because it's not human?